Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Gordon

A “Sound Unwrapped” programme, featuring Aurora Orchestra's trimmed line-up of five musicians and one sound engineer on electronics, proves to be an absolute success. 

Day One of an innovative two-day festival brings a range of orchestral showpieces and contemporary works in a series of one hour concerts. 

Ensemble Signal offered a thoughtful program of works by Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe and a welcome return for older works of two NYC MVPs.

A poignant farewell leaves the home audience wanting more.

A lifetime of achievement that keeps on giving 

Stretching minds and musicians in Manchester Collective’s night of strings and electronics.

Eclectic and contemporary, The Joffrey Ballet reimagines human and kinetic beauty.

Well known for their genre-busting and boundary-defying music, Bang on the Can delivered a splendid Late Night Prom.

It's likely that Mozart never actually heard his Clarinet Concerto performed. That fate, happily, has not been shared by Michael Gordon, who has heard Peter Whelan perform his new bassoon concerto Observations on Air four times this week. 

In Restless, a striking 4-part programme which the Ballett Zürich recently premiered, it’s sheer energy, speed and unequivocal action in the movements of the human body that are underscored. 

Bang on a Can's Lost Objects adds satisfying spice to the National Theater's traditional holiday fare.

Composer David Lang joined the ensemble in Oberlin for an invigorating night of fresh ideas played with a spirit of adventure.

“Timber”, the word, conjures images of trees falling in the wilderness as lumberjacks yell out, of fragrant wood crackling in a fireplace, and of stacks of lumber waiting to be crafted into furniture by carpenters’ rough hands. Michael Gordon’s 2010 work Timber is just as evocative.

Bang on a Can All-Stars are by no means small fish in a big pond. Their work within the world of minimalist and contemporary music, as well as their collaboration with some of the biggest names in 20th-century music, has made of them today a name respected by any fan of John Cage, Steve Reich, Terry Riley or Brian Eno (to name but a few of the best).

This past December at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, six percussionists drummed on wooden planks for an hour in one of the most powerful performances of 2012. The six musicians of Mantra Percussion (Joe Bergen, Al Cerulo, Chris Graham, Michael McCurdy, Jude Traxler, and Nick Woodbury) were performing the New York première of Michael Gordon’s Timber, an immersive and meditative work.

On Saturday night, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fishman Space was the perfect location to recuperate from a stressful week. Unassigned seating, including piles of black pillows, lined all four walls of the space, with Mantra Percussion’s set-up in the center. This set-up consisted of six elevated two-by-fours arranged in a hexagon.

When it comes to new music, the parameters by which we usually observe classical musicians often fade away. In this case we are speaking about eight cellists, and given this program, it would be of little use to comment on the purity of their sound. Tonight’s scores, in fact, frequently required the sound to be pierced and dirty.

Bang on a Can were gentle with their London audience last night, giving the UK première of their Field Recordings project, a sequence of nine new compositions which all involved recorded sound or video samples.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the Kronos Quartet’s ‘Musical Meditation on the Anniversary of 9/11’, the centrepiece of their week-long Barbican residency. Especially, I must confess, when I learned that the recital would feature a children’s choir. There was a chance, I thought, that this would be taking things slightly too far.

Cool venue – cool ensemble – cool concert! The Kronos quartet are successful where so many fail in bringing the often-too-distinct worlds of pop/rock and classical together. This concert highlighted their commitment to forging their own performance aesthetic by only programming music that has been written specifically for them.

Bauhaus und die Gründung der Weimarer Republik dienen als Anregung für die Stuttgarter Uraufführung.

Pluralistische Darbietung der zeitgenössischen Musik: Das exzentrische Eröffnungskonzert der MaerzMusik, Liquid Room, lockte mit 21 Musikstücken in 5 Stunden.